Simple Pleasures of Life

Ever wondered or thought about how you spend your typical day; have you tried to observe your thoughts and see if they follow a particular pattern? I think if we do, we will find that as we grow older our thoughts follow a typical pattern, mostly ending in questions for which we do not have answers but for which we try our best to find answers to; it would mostly be worries revolving around either the personal, professional or health front.

• Do I really want to settle in this city? Can I plan something for the next five years?
• Is the EMI too high? Will the real-estate prices ever come down?
• Am I really doing justice to my potential at work?
• He was so bad at school and look where he is today! Life is really unfair!!
• Why am I falling sick so often?
• Why are flight fares so expensive?
• Why don’t I ever get visibility at work that would help me plan my travel home and save on air fares?!

When not actually working, we tend to spend most of our “brain processing time” in trying to find answers to these and many more questions; the answers to which we feel would finally give us some peace of mind! But alas, by the time we find answers to them, a completely new set of questions arrive to bother us and then we again exercise our free “brain processing power” to find answers. It’s quite a vicious circle and by the time its 3rd week of December, we look back and say “Geez, the year went by so quickly and we just did not find time to enjoy ourselves, hopefully next year we won’t have so many things to worry about” !!! And before you realize year becomes three, becomes five and a decade……….

It is so different from the early school going days where we had absolutely no worries; or in fact very few ones like ensuring that we don’t forget to carry all text-books to class, or don’t forget to trim our finger nails before the Friday assembly. One school of thought is that school days is a phase and as we grow older and more responsible there would be “questions and worries” and we must learn to handle them..It is natural progression. While I understand that it is the norm, my question is can we look at our school days, find out what gave us maximum delight (and when I mean delight it is a period of absolute joy)..and can we replicate the same in our now grown up adult life?

I have set out on this mission and have started taking some initial steps and I must say it does work. It could be anything that you loved doing when young, eagerly looked forward to it, but completely shelved it as you grew older maybe because you did not have the time for it or thought maybe “these things are meant for kids or as they say in Hindi “bachon wali harkate hain”…Not for grown-ups and mature people like us”. Try looking back, make a list of things that you loved and start taking out time for it during weekends. And while doing it completely forget about all current worries, office work, switch-off your mobile phones and just immerse yourselves…..It would be re-freshing, energizing and most importantly lots of fun!.Its called re-living the simple pleasures of life.